Anne Focke Is A Pack Rat

Anne Focke is a writer, instigator, and innovator in the arts and cultural fields, whose life work includes initiating and influencing a variety of organizations locally in the Seattle area and nationally.

A volunteer advisory group has been working with Anne since 2017 to organize, identify, and index her collection of papers (comprising around 200 banker boxes). These include planning documents, organizational records, consulting projects, writing and editing work, interviews, correspondence with artists, and other material that reflect the many layers of her involvement in the arts nationally and her prescient interests in how art, artists, and communities work.

This valuable collection reflects the far-ranging work that Anne has done and its unique impact in that it:

• records the history of a number of institutions, ventures, and groups during their start-up phase, before they were formalized and began keeping their own records
• represents a period of contemporary art and history (1968 – 2024+) that spans from the pre-digital world to the present and the ways that organizations and artists’ work changed during this crucial period
• documents the often unseen importance and scope of women’s leadership during a period when management of regional arts institutions was a largely male-dominated field.